POSTSCRIPT

the hands of the Central Government in Prague. Hardly was the
ink dry before they were agitating for a separate Slovak army,
for a separate Slovak National Bank and finance. Their Ministers
paid visits to Berlin without troubling to inform the Czecho-
slovak Foreign Minister in Prague. The German Press, which
desired the Czechs to put their house in order, supported the
vendetta of these Slovak leaders against Prague. In Slovakia,
which had received home-rule from the hands of Hitler, all
parties other than the Slovak Nationalist Party, founded by the
late Father Hlinka and now led by another priest. Father Josef
Tiso, had been abolished. Hitler had in effect put into power
there a little Catholic-Fascist regime strongly reminiscent of the
Dollfuss and Schuschnigg regimes in Austria, or even of Briining's
Centre Party in Germany. But he only used these Slovak priest-
politicians; they will not last any more than independent Slovakia
will last

When the crisis broke, the flight of these Slovak politicians to
Germany, their appeal to Hitler to liberate them, showed who
was behind the Slovak separatist campaign and who wanted the
Czecho-Slovak house to disrupt.

Meanwhile, Germany accompanied her support of the Slovak
politicians by continual demands and complaints, demands and
complaints, in Prague. Why had no restrictive measures been
taken against the Jews? Why was this or that newspaper allowed
to write favourably about Benesh? The Germans remaining in
Czecho-Slovakia had not enough rights; why were they not
allowed to wear Nazi uniforms, organize their own Nazi Party,
demonstrate and so on? The Leader of the few score thousand
Germans in the rump Republic, Herr Ernst Kundt, made
menacing speeches, threatening the mutilated State with some
new but unspecified fate. In the small German-speaking islands
in Czechia and Slovakia, such as the Iglau and Zips districts,
little organized Nazi communities began a vendetta against the
Czechs.

Desperately the Czech leaders tried to keep pace with demands
and intrigues that were only meant to be unacceptable and to

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